OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN: an Overview from the VCS
Kathy Evans
Chief Executive
kathy.evans@childrenengland.org.uk
@childrenengland
@Kathy_CEO_CE
The Voluntary Sector
•
64,000 charities (half of all charities) in England have
children, young people and families as their main
beneficiaries (2009/10 data)
•
And a further 21,000 ‘civil society’ organisations
•
Total income - £3.3 billion (core c.yp.f service sector),
PLUS £8.7billion in wider sector serving cyp as part of
but not the focus of their delivery
•
96% operate at local level only
•
54% do not employ any paid staff
•
91% have an annual income of less than £100k
•
53% have an annual income of less than £10k
•
Only 1% of their total income is from corporates
‘Business Storms’ in the Voluntary & Community Sector
Severe simultaneous pressures on all
areas of VCS business models
• Increasing fuel bills, high price inflation, pension
costs.
• Public grant-giving diminishing; competition for
all funds high
• Do more for less while it costs more to get less
• Donation income relatively resilient
• Salary cuts and workforce reductions highest of
all 3 sectors
• Increasing service demand from children,
young people and families is reported right
across both VCS and statutory services.
• Organisational strength substantially weakened
by investment and asset value losses and
continuing low interest rates
• Ongoing cashflow pressures on reserves.
• Adaptation to new business models, social
finance opportunities and more commercial
‘trading’ models is being embraced, but cannot
be achieved quickly, and open to question as
‘effective’ in some practice areas.
• The primary blockage to taking up social
finance opportunities for many VCSO’s is low, or
highly uncertain, revenue funding prospects.
‘Locality Storms’ in Children and Families Services
The ‘Chaos Theory’ of
Interdependence
• Changes in one public authority,
body or service have knock-on
impacts for other agencies in the
‘support chain’
• Training budgets are under severe
pressure right across statutory and
voluntary agencies,
• Some charities are having to
consider rationing criteria or waiting
lists to manage and prioritise
increased service demand
• Early intervention levels of support
appear at highest risk of being
reduced or cut, potentially storing up
problems for the future as unmet
needs may escalate to further
increase demand for higher cost and
complex services later.
• Risk levels and risk transfer are
serious issues – both financial risks
and caseload risks
Demonstrating Impact on Children’s Outcomes in the VCS
•
Same belief that making a real difference in children’s lives is the only goal
worth setting ourselves and we have to know, and show, that we do
•
Drivers and demands to ‘prove impact’ are not restricted to public sector
commissioning at all – charitable funders and even small grants providers
now demanding increasingly high evidence standards
•
Donors have ALWAYS wanted to know what difference we make, in the
most tangible terms possible, and VCS often have great stories to tell of
what they achieve…….BUT:
•
Different funders have some very different ideas / frameworks and
expectations of what constitutes convincing evidence for different kinds of
work
•
Different funders have very wide-ranging ideas about desirable / feasible /
measurable outcomes for a VCS organisation to account for
•
Much of what the VCS sector does is not an intervention or a service, nor a
‘model’ nor a ‘programme’ – it is ‘doing something rather than nothing with
whatever we can muster’; being something to take part in; someone to talk
to (unconditionally); somewhere to find sanctuary, solace, fun or escape,
friendship, solidarity, voice.
The problem with ‘evidencing’ real life!
Impact on Outcomes: A Whodunnit Puzzle
Measurable improved
learning outcomes,
BUT:
Whodunnit?
• A role
?
• A ‘Programme’ ?
• A ‘Sector’ ?
Statutory or
Voluntary
Jenny:
•
•
A Grade student overall –
maths was a struggle
Parents hired private tutor
when predicted a C at 14
Alex:
•
•
Young carer, mother with
bipolar disorder
Was in foster care aged
11-13
Whodunnit Now?
Whodunnit?
Answer: Alex and Jenny
They achieved their grades – and they have the most critical ‘intelligence’ about what
helped them most
Who or what helped you the MOST in getting that A in maths?
Jenny:
“My 1:1 time with my maths tutor obviously helped a lot, but I don’t think it all really
made sense to me until I started volunteering as a mentor with the children in my
old junior school. That’s when I finally started feeling confident about maths”
Alex:
“More than anyone else, I’d say Jenny. If she hadn’t been sitting next to me and
explaining the stuff she was learning from her tutor, I’d have fallen way behind. And
if she hadn’t been my friend on the end of the phone the night before the exam
when I was panicking, I might not have turned up!”
Lessons from the ‘Whodunnit’ tale
•
Outcomes belong to the person whose life they describe – services and agencies can only ever
appropriately claim to have contributed to achieving them, however significantly
•
No account of impact on a person’s outcomes is complete without their own assessment of what
helped and what didn’t. Their insights can be as radically challenging to ‘assumed wisdom’ as some
RCT evidence.
•
What children do with / for other people in their lives can be as ‘active’ a variable in achieving their
outcomes as what anyone else does with/for them
•
‘Secondary’ outcomes and unintended impacts matter
•
When outcomes are good / improving we can afford to be relatively sanguine and inclusive about
evaluating ‘contributions’ to success. However, service / programme evaluation has little to offer the
accurate ‘diagnosis’ of what has gone wrong when children’s outcomes are poor
•
Long / short term and ‘cumulative’ influences on outcomes are hard to ascribe and to isolate. Blame
tends to get passed backwards, credit tends to be held among the present ‘players’
•
The most influential family, friendship and professional ‘roles’ in children’s daily lives are not usually
time-limited, planned, ‘programmed’, or impact/outcome assessed.
Commissioning for Localism – including VCS
contribution to outcomes in LA commissioning strategies
Sutton: Outcomes Based Accountability
• collaborative outcomes reporting to LA into a single balanced
scorecard
• co-producing measures & mechanisms – helping VCS to show what
they contribute in ways that are manageable, consistent and useful
• outcomes ‘belong’ to the children, monitored in one dataset by LA,
and all agencies contribute in different ways
Torbay: Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)
• start with the ‘what helps you most / least’ question to children,
families and communities
• how can we strengthen, support the relationships and groups
through which you help yourselves and each other?
• process generated 2 new parent-led social enterprises, even before
commissioning plans developed
• then…commissioning to fill gaps and add capacity, with community
members in ‘driving and deciding’ seats – community panels and
hubs integrated in Early Help and safeguarding triage processes
Some challenges for the ‘evidencing outcomes’ agenda
•
What is the future for public sector commissioning ‘models’ – more programmes or more
personalisation?
•
Can we keep it all in proportion?
•
Is it the management model we must evidence, or the practice modality/philosophy?
•
Can we disentangle evidencing impact and outcomes from contract compliance?
•
Can we expect competing organisations to share evaluation learning when it may be their ‘USP’ for the
next bid?
•
While we should embrace the challenges and learning that come from scientific approaches to
evidence, can we remember that great practice with children is really an art?
•
Can we recognise the ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ being asked of those with budgets to cut deeply while
improving outcomes for children? Use evidence where it helps, but they also need space to fund
models so new or different that there is no evaluation evidence, because in their judgement it is simply
the right thing to try